A Matter of Degree
May 23, 2011
In today’s Washington Post you can find a story in the Metro section about a typo on Georgetown University’s commencement program cover. The headline and much of the story’s content focuses on the transposition of two letters in the word “university.”
This is a blog about language and we’ve noted in earlier posts that the Post has lost its groove when it comes to producing clean, error-free copy. I’m not calling them out for noting the error. It’s just the degree to which they’ve highlighted it that irks me. For the newspaper to make such a big deal about a single typo strikes me as a case of people living in glass houses throwing stones. Notoriously, the Post has gone downhill in the copy editing department ever since they’ve thinned the ranks of what used to be one of the finest stables of copy editors around.
Yes, misspelling “university” is embarrassing and shouldn’t have happened. But I suspect it occurred for the same reason that it happens daily among the pages of the Post and in other publications: fewer people are taking on more work as resources shrink. It’s true at Georgetown, as it is true pretty much everywhere else.
I’ve made my share of typos (I made three errors in the first draft of this post which my husband caught. By the way, he caught two errors in the Post yesterday). When I have time I use the old proofreader’s trick of reading text backwards so as to catch errors that my mind might otherwise skip over. But, alas, mistakes still get through. So until we all replace our windows with Plexiglas®, maybe we shouldn’t throw such big stones.
–Barbara
REPORTER’S MIND WANDERS WHILE WRITING STORY
December 5, 2009
The Salahis—that odd couple who gate-crashed the White House’s state dinner—showed up at a Front Royal, VA, courthouse yesterday to answer to an unrelated suit involving their failure to pay money to a landscaper they had hired. They were met, unsurprisingly, by a larger-than-usual number of reporters. “Camped outside,” the Washington Post reporter wrote, “was a media circus of 20 reporters and photographers.”
Setting aside the perplexing question of angels and heads of pins, does twenty really count as a “circus”? I suppose it might if that “media circus” at Front Royal was made up of the clowns who should have been back at the Post copy-editing their stories.
–Dennis
